Google Sued By Chinese Author Over Scanned Book

Google is being sued by Chinese author Mian Mian, who has accused it of scanning her book, Acid House, without her permission and listing it on its Google Books library.

In the copyright infringement lawsuit, which was filed in October, Mian is seeking damages in tune of 61,000 Yuan (USD$8,950 or £5,576) from Google. The search engine giant has claimed that the book was removed from the Google Books database when the company got to know about the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, the author’s lawyers told BBC news that the Beijing judge presiding over the case has ordered both the parties to hold settlement talks but has not set a deadline for reporting back to the court.

Google Books, the project with which Google aims to scan and catalogue millions of books around the world in order to make them available and searchable online is being severely criticised by many countries, technology companies and publishers as they believe that Google is violating rights of thousands of authors and publishers by scanning their works without their permission.

The company has been facing copyright infringement lawsuits all over the world, the latest being the 300,000 Euro lawsuit filed by the French company, La Martinier, on behalf of several French publishers and authors.

Our Comments

Google is trying to adopt the same attitude in this Google Books case as it did with Youtube. Indeed, one can argue that Google should have verify beforehand that the content that it is putting on its website is in the public domain. Simply saying that it was unaware of the facts is not acceptable.